Comment

Don't dismiss the Church of England as wishy-washy

On the 18.28 Southport-Wigan Wallgate train on Thursday were marchers from that day's Liverpool Orange Order parade in Southport. 'Fuck the Pope,' they drunkenly sang, amid ever coarser, more explicit anti-Fenian songs. The toilet in the train had been locked so an Orange marcher full of beer urinated besides the exit door as the only viable means of relief while excoriating all things Irish Catholic.

Had he witnessed it, the Pope might have felt yet more justified in his judgment that Protestantism could never create churches. It might create Christian 'communities', but because it could not trace its lineage back to the first Christian divines, it could never claim the status of being a full church. Nor did Protestant 'communities' have a sacramental priesthood or a communion based on liturgical mystery, although of course the Holy Spirit might still reveal itself to them. Revelation was certainly absent on the 18.28.

In a curious way the Pope and the drunk Orange marchers are mirror images of each other. The Pope's pronouncement was a piece of fundamentalist partisanship that deserves every bit of anti-papist sentiment. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches, representing Protestant churches in more than 100 countries, declared that it made them wonder whether they are indeed praying for genuine Christian unity when they jointly pray with Catholics. Well might they wonder.

The boys from the Orange Order parade were more obvious about their motivation. They were simply getting pissed and showing an intense, animal, masculine togetherness; the best and most enjoyable way they could bond was by asserting their unity against the other - in this case Irish-Catholic republicanism. It felt more like supporters at a football match than a political/religious fraternity. This was not about argument; it was about identity.

The Pope is up to the same game. Christians worship the same God, who (if one exists) would certainly not pick and choose between Protestant and Catholic. Yet with one pronouncement the Pope has reopened the arguments of the 16th century, with the provocative claim that it is only through the priesthood, and the mystery of the sacrament actually turning into Christ's blood and body at communion, that a Christian believer can best come to God. It is as if the European Enlightenment had never been.

But in 2007 the Pope feels it necessary to assert Catholic identity, just as fundamentalist Muslims, American Christian evangelicals, and even Ulster Protestants do theirs. The Good Friday Agreement, and power-sharing in Northern Ireland, seem all the more remarkable; mutual tolerance in a wider world where tolerance is receding.

It is an era of growing dogmatism - almost as if the more people believe their identity to be under threat, especially the totems of masculinity, the more they have dogmatically to assert it. I have great sympathy with both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose two polemics against the menace of religion, The God Delusion and God is not Great, are justly best-sellers. But they are dogmatists too; as passionate whippers-up of hate against the religious to assert their secular identity as any evangelical missionary for Christianity.

As an agnostic, I have come to respect the liberal humanism of the Church of England more and more - even though that is under assault from its own evangelicals and now from the Pope. It is just a 'community'; even worse, it came into being as an historical accident because an English king wanted a divorce.

Yet it is precisely because the Church of England has such origins that it is able to make a Christian case based on openness and tolerance. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas acknowledges the Enlightenment's debt to Christianity; human equality was founded on our equality before God. Morality is similarly indebted; it is through religious categories that we come to understand the difference between what is wrong and what is evil. It is why he insists on the need to tolerate and respect religion rather than take it apart.

In this respect the Church of England has much to teach secular and religious fundamentalists alike. It is one of this country's great Enlightenment institutions. It is where reason has successfully co-existed alongside faith, in just the way the Pope used to argue when he was mere Cardinal Ratzinger.

Its evangelicals point to its declining congregations as evidence of its weakness; the truth is they are paradoxically a sign of its effectiveness - that in England and Wales most people understand how to reconcile faith and reason, which does not necessarily mean regular worship inside a church. That does not mean they do not honour faith; it is just they no longer want a fight. It is an instinct the Pope, Dawkins, Hitchens and the Orange Order could all do well to follow.